As a comics editor, writer, and fan myself, I got interested in how often people at conventions experience harassment. So earlier this year I conducted a survey on sexual harassment in comics, receiving 3,600 responses from people that varied from fans to professionals. The survey was distributed and conducted online, with people sharing it via Twitter, Facebook, and especially Tumblr and self-reporting all information. Of the people taking the survey, 55 percent of respondents were female, 39 percent were male, and six percent were non-binary (see the raw survey data here).

Out of all respondents, 59 percent said they felt sexual harassment was a problem in comics and 25 percent said they had been sexually harassed in the industry. The harassment varied: while in the workplace or at work events, respondents were more likely to suffer disparaging comments about their gender, sexual orientation, or race. At conventions, respondents were more likely to be photographed against their wishes. Thirteen percent reported having unwanted comments of a sexual nature made about them at conventions—and eight percent of people of all genders reported they had been groped, assaulted, or raped at a comic convention.

The one weakness of the study that I can see is that respondents were self-selected, as opposed to this being a truly random sampling. It’s the same issue I ran into with my survey of first novel sales a few years back. But even taking that into consideration, if you can take 3600 fans and pros, and a quarter of them have experienced sexual harassment in the industry, then we have a huge problem here.

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Game designer Brianna Wu wrote an article called “No Skin Thick Enough” about the daily harassment of women in video gaming. Warning: some of the examples and quotes in this article are truly abhorrent.

My name is Brianna Wu. I lead a development studio that makes games. Sometimes, I write about issues in the games industry that relate to the equality of women. My reward is that I regularly have men threatening to rape and commit acts of violence against me.

Wu provides four case studies illustrating the types of harassment women experience, and examining myths and realities about the gaming industry. Their stories are powerful, important, and eye-opening.

13 Comments

D. D. WebbJul 24, 2014 @ 09:56:09

Yeesh… I’ve been to exactly one con in my life, and I’m starting to be glad I’m not more involved in fandom. This is sobering, to say the least.

I wonder if anyone’s done any sort of study–scientific or not–comparing the rates of harassment within the “geek” community to those in the culture at large. Are we really worse than the rest of the world? I’m almost afraid to know, but after reading this I feel like we need to.

I’m not aware of any data showing fandom to be better or worse than the culture at large when it comes to sexual harassment.

Rob MeyerJul 24, 2014 @ 10:42:11

I think a large part of this is the anonymity of the internet. If game companies and locations like reddit had a process in place for dealing with this type of harassment that would include, banning from the site, reporting threats to the local authorities (just like the phone company would), and publicly outing the offender, these things would be much rarer. In many cases, I believe being anonymous is a positive thing, but too often it is a privilege abused. Certainly, some companies like Activision could take action against this type of thing when they have billing information on file. I realize, too, prosecution when things like hacked accounts are potentially involved make policing things like this difficult, but more can be done.

QuinallaJul 24, 2014 @ 11:48:16

I think the anonymity of the internet is a strong tool that predators use and is something that can embolden folks to speak their minds more plainly, but it isn’t the underlying issue. The people (mostly men) saying these things believe them, most often it is all subconscious beliefs that men are superior to women, that women are just there to please, etc. though some of course have examined and fully embraced this way of thinking (ick). These folks get so enraged about a woman criticizing something they love, beating them or being better at something, having an opinion that they don’t approve of, hell they even get enraged about women EXISTING in “their” spaces. They may feel they can be more forthright with anonymity, but the root of it is that so, so many of us (yes even as a woman I catch myself thinking that my opinion isn’t worth as much, etc.) have these misogynistic attitudes rooted so deeply.

I really enjoy video games (and all sorts of other geek fandom), but there have definitely been times that I just have to log off as I can’t take it anymore. More often though, I just avoid the situations all-together. I choose not to participate in certain things because I know what is waiting for me as soon as I speak up on voice chat in online games, or go to that con by myself, or go into a comic/game shop, or out myself as a woman on a forum, or have to watch one more misogynistic-trope fest just to get some good gameplay, etc. And that isn’t just my loss, though it certainly is that, it is the community’s loss and revenue lost for gaming companies.

Thanks Jim for linking to these articles, not ones I had run across yet and they had good links within them as well. Brianna Wu’s article really spoke to me, I just kept nodding and saying “yes exactly!” throughout the entire thing. I know you don’t do it for cookies, but I continue to appreciate how you try to be a good ally by listening to and signal boosting others, so thank you.

Rob MeyerJul 24, 2014 @ 16:04:31

I agree. Anonymity simply allows cowards to say what should get them shamed in the real world. The problem does lie deeper and in some ways I think it is getting worse, not better. I believe we are seeing the development of cybertribalism, wherein anyone with even the most extreme views can find support on the internet. I believe this is why we have seen an increase in multiple shootings and other forms of extreme behavior. It is also the reason we can talk to other people about very specialized interests like cosplay, fencing, Lovecraft and particle physics. The difference is that extreme behavior that hurts people is aided by anonymity in that shame cannot be used to correct that behavior. Much like the KKK wearing hoods allowed people with very base beliefs the freedom to indulge those beliefs without retribution until they were exposed. To a lesser degree, we see this with the polarization of news channels. Fox News viewers only hear their own opinions reflected back to them, reinforcing an increasingly conservative outlook. If you look at guys who spend time in a misogynistic website pounding their chests among others who pound their chests and grunt in agreement whenever someone outside the cyberfort is banned for having cooties, you see the goal becomes one of identifying the chestthumper, then educating him properly. Unfortunately, while we wait around to identify and correct that part of the problem, women are developing PTSD as a result of the harassment they receive.

lkeke35Jul 24, 2014 @ 20:56:26

There’s nothing inherently wrong with anonymity, but it is being used to commit emotional and psychological assault against certain factions of the online community. The collective purpose of all of it is basically a great big giant STFU to anyone who dares speak up.

I see your point about consequences in the real world but I also see this in a positive light too. The more marginalized groups speak out, the harder the backlash gets. The more often and louder the STFU gets. Every anonymous rant, every rape and death threat is a sign that what we are doing is right. At the absolute worst of the Civil Rights movement, people were losing their lives, there were dogs, waterhoses, bombings and lynchings, but inroads was made despite the pushback from those protecting the status quo.

@Quimalla: that said , I don’t fault you for your behavior in the slightest. You do have to self care. Your emotional and psychological well being come first and if that means retreating for a while, then so be it. Do what you have to do but remember, all this pushback is to accomplish the goal of making women, LGBTQ, PoC and others, shut up and the assertion of the harassers authority on how such forums and spaces are used. So please, take care of yourself as much as you can but I encourage you to not give up the fight to BE, bc the opposite of that is their aim.

MichelleJul 24, 2014 @ 21:31:42

If a non-American can step in for a moment, I suspect the main reason America is experiencing more gun crime is because you refuse to regulate the industry.

If cyber-tribalism affects people as much as you say, New Zealand is certainly not immune, and yet shootings here are incredibly rare (our only school shooting was in 1923 – two children died). I’m not saying we’re perfect, or that there is no violent crime here, but our tragedies do usually have single digit body counts.

I do agree that anonymity is less a cause and more a method of illustrating a pre-exisiting condition (if you hit Facebook, Youtube, Twitter etc you can find dozens of people saying horrendous things under their real names, or at least their real pseudonyms, the ones they give to their rl friends).

I suspect quite a few factors contribute to this kind of thing. Like, lots, but on a bad day I just chalk it all down to an over-developed sense of entitlement. People forgetting that their right to swing their fists ends at other people’s noses and all that. Also, the American Constitution – freedom of speech protects you from the American government, not the international forum mods, and people really need to stop trying to hide behind it.

And it would be nice for there to be a mechanism for prosecution in cases that cross the line into criminal behavior. The problem, of course, is that we have a patchwork of anti stalking and anti sexual harassment laws, and it’s not clear which state’s or municipality’s laws would apply in any given case.

Unless something happened at the federal level.

Rob MeyerJul 25, 2014 @ 02:18:55

Looking over the statistics on guns, I don’t believe regulation is the cause of the problem. I do believe some changes in guns and gun regulation might help, but historically there has been no lessening of regulation that might explain an increase in gun violence. The increase in violence (not just guns, but large scale killing) looks like it starts in 1985, with the advent of the internet and the 24-hour new channel. Looking at the couple in Nevada who first joined the idiots in the Bundy camp. They found Bundy on the web and sought to encourage them to kill the police. They were too extreme for the Bundy followers (apparently not too extreme to cause them to report to the police) and so the couple was thrown out. From there they were looking for others like themselves, until they went on their killing spree. Guns, in and of themselves are not the problem, they are an aspect of a larger, more complex problem. Why is New Zealand not part of that problem? Lower population density, better overall education, sheep therapy, any of which could help explain that difference. Maybe even chemicals in our biosphere are at a higher level than New Zealand. Then we can look at China, where population density and pollution surpass the U.S. and wonder that combination of factors prevent the kind of violence we have. Culture, repressive society or better overall diet? Maybe the problem is really some kind of social Settlers of Catan combination requiring 4 guns, 2 religious extremism, 5 economic inequality and 1 racial insensitivity in order to have a mass murder, but I bet having cameras around to capture it does nothing to inhibit it either.

GregJul 25, 2014 @ 16:20:20

“If you can take 3600 fans and pros, and a quarter of them have experienced sexual harassment in the industry, then we have a huge problem here.”

Well… no. Only if it is statistically over the level you’d see in a sampling of the larger population. If the average person is almost the same likelihood of seeing.

Given that another study from June found that 65 percent of women and 25 percent of men reported experiencing public harassment… it sounds like the Comics and Video Games industry is trending at OR BELOW average levels…

Now of course we can get into the accuracy of the studies… but the point is that based on this data alone you can’t draw any specific conclusions about the industries.

Just that society as a whole has problems with it…

mkljJul 26, 2014 @ 21:09:20

@Greg – Experiencing public harassment is not the same thing as experiencing harassment in a professional setting. I’d expect the rates of the former to be higher than the rates of the latter. As a professional outside the video/gaming industry who has definitely experienced harassment in public (as have virtually all women I know), I can assure you that there’s no way 25% of women in my industry have experienced what women in video/gaming experience. There is a BIG problem when these things are happening in industry settings.

Pat Munson-SiterJul 31, 2014 @ 19:06:20

It should be noted that main stream media has gotten hold of this issue. I have seen several reports (esp shared on Face Book) about the harassment problems that have been happening at Comicon, for instance. Cons need to start instituting – and USING – anti-harassment policies. Gods know that the media love to portray con goers as ‘weird’ at best; what happens when they realize there is some seriously nasty stuff going on at some cons, and the con staff aren’t doing anything about it?

This truly saddens me. I mean, I knew it was an issue before, but I’m still appalled. You’d think that people intelligent enough to be involved in geekdom, gaming, etc. would also have the good sense to treat women like human beings. I’m not saying ALL men treat women this way at cons. But to the extent it does happen, it’s an excruciating disappointment, to say the least.